Codemash CTF 2019 - The Parrot

Clue

Hint

Opening the file with a tool other than a PDF viewer, could be helpful.

Approach

This is a password protected PDF, so we need to crack that first. I downloaded pdfcrack on my kali VM and ran the following command (using one of the wordlists on the machine):

pdfcrack ./parrot.pdf -w /usr/share/wordlists/sqlmap.txt

This yields us the password cracker. From there you open the PDF and just see a parrot, so maybe something is hidden behind it. I found an online image extractor that supports passwords, which yielded me the flag: